heard and felt was silence.
Reggie walked into the RC on the two hundred fifty-seventh day of my fifteenth year, exactly four months after my mother died. I know that because I’ve been counting the days without her. It was a Thursday, and it was raining. I was in the kitchen, listening to the rap Cook likes to put on. My job on kitchen shift that day was to chop enough carrots for forty-five people. It gets old, prepping food for the RC. I like to do it in a rhythm. Wash, peel, chop. Wash, peel, chop. I go pretty fast, so when a hand looped in and grabbed a carrot coin, I almost took off my own finger.
“Watch it!” I said. I didn’t look up. I was mad at having to chop, mad at freeloaders who came in and put their fingers in the food when we were clearly working to get the meal done.
When he didn’t answer, I finally glanced at the culprit. There he was. Tall, lanky. About nineteen or twenty. Arms swinging like loose ropes.
“Sorry,” he said, grinning. But obviously he wasn’t sorry, because the next thing he did was reach in and grab another carrot. And my heart? It flipped out.
It would be a huge understatement to say that my mother’s absence had left a cavernous hole in my life. In fact, even on that day of the carrots, I’d awoken to a wet pillow. I cried so much I didn’t even know when I was crying anymore. So Reggie, with his loose limbs and crooked eyes, came into my life at just exactly the right time to take me somewhere else.
“You want to get high?” he said, still munching.
I didn’t, really. I’ve never been into pot, actually. Mom used to say it breeds perpetual laziness, and I’ve never liked the way it makes my mouth and my mind feel as though they’ve been stuffed with old cotton balls. But anything seemed better than crying into the carrots, so I said, “Okay, yeah. Sure.”
Every couple days he’d come find me to get high. We’d talk about music, or I’d listen to his stories about the stuff he’d done. I mean, the kid had been everywhere. He’d run a hotel on some island off Thailand, fought fires in Switzerland, studied with Buddhists in Nepal. I never got tired of listening. He was just so… cool. Then one day about a week after he arrived, he put his arm around me. I remember that his body smelled strange and distinctly unfeminine—like onions, dirt, and beer.
“Listen, Pudge,” he said. That was Billy’s nickname for me. Much to my annoyance, Reggie had picked it up. “I heard about your mom. I’m really sorry.”
“Thanks.” I stared at the ground so he wouldn’t see the tears starting to form.
“I totally know what you’re going through,” he said.
“What do you mean?” He had mentioned that his parents lived in San Diego. Were they dead?
Reggie looked away. “My girlfriend died last year. In a plane crash. So I know what it’s like to lose someone.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” God, here I was feeling sorry for myself all the time. But it wasn’t like other people didn’t have problems. “How? A big crash? Was it in the news?”
“Oh no. It was a small plane. No one heard about it. In fact, I never tell people because it makes me too bummed. But you’re special, so…” He flipped his hair out of his eyes. “Anyway, I feel your pain. It’s tough.”
I nodded. The tears that before had been just a threat were now a mortifying reality.
“Oh, man. Sorry, Pudge,” he said. “Here. Sit on my lap.”
Pretty soon, a weird thing happened. I began thinking about Reggie so much that it was almost impossible to let anything else into my crowded brain—including how sad I was. I had never really cared about guys before. Some of the older ones were cool, but mostly what mattered to me was what kind of jokes they made or whether they were mean to me or not. But Reggie! He’d bring his guitar to the lawn and play us the most awesome songs about all of the places he had traveled. He’d left home at twelve to circumnavigate the world on his friend’s boat. He was an ordained minister, a trained chef—not to mention a thoroughly skilled pot farmer, which is most likely why Big Jon kept him around.
“You’re the only person I can talk to, you know, Pudge,” he’d say, making